(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a found-item information management server, a found-item information management program, and a found-item information management method for managing information about lost items, and more particularly to a found-item information management server, a found-item information management program, and a found-item information management method for providing found-item information through a wide area network.
(2) Description of the Related Art
When a person finds a lost item in town, it is difficult for the finder to directly search for the owner of the found property and hand the found item over to the owner unless the found item carries some kind of description of the owner. Generally, it is customary for the finder to report the found item to an authorized organization, and for the owner to contact the organization to inquire about the item and, if lucky, to confirm the reported item and get hold of the property. In Japan, the authorized organization may be a police station, a police box, or a police post which has jurisdiction over the location where the lost item has been found.
For the finder of a lost-item to report the property, they need to take the trouble to go to an authority such as a police box and follow a certain procedure to file the report. If the finder finds the lost item at a location far away from a police box or does not know where a nearby police box is because the finder is a stranger around there, then the finder may find it highly troublesome to report to the authority. Since reporting a lost item to an authority such as a police box depends in reality on the goodwill of the finder, the possibility that the owner can recover the lost property is lower as the trouble that the finder has to take is greater.
Certain facilities such as train stations and department stores have a lost and found corner for temporarily keeping lost properties. Those lost and found corners may possibly reduce the burden on finders about the reporting of found items.
However, if there are available a plurality of places that a finder can report the lost item to, then the owner of the property cannot determine which one of those places the owner should ask for the lost item. Generally, when the owner of a lost item asks a place which is different from the place which the lost item has actually been reported to, the owner is unable to confirm that the lost property has been reported as a found item to the other place.
According the invention disclosed in Japanese laid-open patent publication No. 9-91340, networked terminals are set up in respective organizations including train stations and police boxes to allow those organizations to share information about lost items, so that the owner of a lost item can ask any one of those organizations to ascertain whether there has been a report on the lost item or not.
Private facilities, typically, department stores which have corners for temporarily keeping lost properties find those temporary storage offices lacking direct merits because keeping lost items and answering inquiries from owners is a labor-intensive task. At present, therefore, the facilities capable of sharing a database of information about found properties and providing a service of storing found properties are limited to public facilities such as train stations and some large private organizations such as large department stores which need to differentiate their services from other department stores. Since the database of information about found properties is shared among a limited number of organizations, the owner of a lost property can confirm whether the lost item has been reported or not only at those limited organizations or facilities.
It has been proposed to make the information about found properties available on a wide area network such as the Internet. However, the information about found properties available to anyone who has access to the wide area network tends to suffer the problem of poor security against unlawful actions. For example, if all the information about found properties is available on the wide area network, then it is impossible to prevent a third party from masquerading as the owner of a found item and claiming the found item unlawfully (the action for third party to masquerade as the owner of a found item will hereinafter be referred to as “owner masquerading”).
The finder of a lost item has to go to one of the organizations which handle lost and found items and report the lost item to that organization. If there are a smaller number organizations available for accepting found items, then finders find it more troublesome to report the found property to one of those organizations. As a result, actions to report lost items are liable to be slow. The procedure that a finder must follow in reporting the found-item to an organization (e.g., a police box) is time-consuming because the finder is usually interviewed by a person (e.g., a police officer) in charge in the organization. Consequently, when a passerby who does not want to be bothered finds a lost property, they tend to walk away without picking up and reporting the lost item.
Heretofore, the percentage of found items that are reported is low and the recovery of lost-items by the owners is slow because, as described above, the information about found items should not be made available on a wide area network for the purpose of preventing owner masquerading, the finders of lost items need to take a lot of trouble in reporting those items, and the availability of facilities which accept and store found properties is restricted. As a consequence, the owners of lost items either cannot found their properties or take a long period of time before recovering their properties.